Gregory was elected Superintendent of Public Instruction in Michigan in 1858, after several years spent as editor of the Michigan Journal of Education. After leaving office in 1864 he became the second president of Kalamazoo College from 1864 until 1867. Gregory served as the president of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from the university's founding in 1867 until his resignation in 1880. While Gregory credited Jonathan Baldwin Turner as the central figure in the university's establishment, Gregory, during his tenure as University of Illinois's first president, helped determine the direction of the university by advocating the presence of a classically based liberal arts curriculum in addition to the industrial and agricultural curriculum desired by the Illinois Industrial League and many state residents and lawmakers of the time. One of Gregory's most important contributions to the development of the University of Illinois was his commitment to the education of women. In 1870 Gregory cast the deciding vote to admit women to the U of I, making Illinois the first university after the Civil War to admit women. In his 1872 University Report he wrote, "No industry is more important to human happiness and well being than that which makes the home. And this industry involves principles of science as many and as profound as those which control any other human employment" To keep this commitment to the education of women he hired Louisa C. Allen in 1874 to develop a program in domestic science. Although the experiment in domestic science would only last six years, it was the first domestic science degree program in higher education.
The Seven Laws of Teaching
In 1886 Gregory authored his most well-known work The Seven Laws of Teaching, which asserted that a teacher should:
Know thoroughly and familiarly the lesson you wish to teach; or, in other words, teach from a full mind and a clear understanding.
Gain and keep the attention and interest of the pupils upon the lesson. Refuse to teach without attention.
Use words understood by both teacher and pupil in the same sense—language clear and vivid alike to both.
Begin with what is already well known to the pupil in the lesson or upon the subject, and proceed to the unknown by single, easy, and natural steps, letting the known explain the unknown.
Use the pupil's own mind, exciting his self-activities. keep his thoughts as much as possible ahead of your expression, making him a discoverer of truth.
Require the pupil to reproduce in thought the lesson he is learning—thinking it out in its parts, proofs, connections, and applications til he can express it in his own language.
Review, review, REVIEW, reproducing correctly the old, deepening its impression with new thought, correcting false views, and completing the true.
School Funds and School Laws of Michigan: With Notes and Forms to which are Added Elements of School Architecture etc. with Lists of Text Books and School Books
Relations of the Normal School to the school Systems of the States: An Address, Delivered at the Re-Dedication of the State Normal School Building, at Ypsilanti, April 18, 1860
The Right and Duty of Christianity to Educate: Inaugural address of John M. Gregory... Delivered at the Jubilee Meeting at Kalamazoo, Tuesday evening, September 20th, 1864
The Hand-book of History and Chronology: Embracing Modern History, Both European and America for the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries for Students of History and Adapted to Accompany the Map of Time
Normal class manual for Bible Teachers
Syllabus of Lectures on the History of Civilization. To Senior Classes of the Illinois Industrial University. Winter term, 1877
